From the Ipswich Tribune May 29, 1930 edition
LIBRARY IS BIG ASSET TO TOWN
The Ipswich Public Library is a great asset to the town and to the people in this vicinity and it can be made still more of a benefit without any expense to the taxpayers, if more take out books.
Thomas Edison wrote as follows:
“It was the books I borrowed from the Detroit Public Library, in the days when Detroit Public Library in the day when I was a train boy and too poor to buy then, that gave the scientific information I needed for my early experiments. I cannot be too grateful for the library privileges accorded me and I hope we may speed the time when every boy in America-as well as every girl and every man and woman-may have free access to books.”
Everybody will remember how Edison performed electrical experiments on the train based on information he received from library books and although he never had much school education the information he secured from the library is what put him where he is today, probably one of the three greatest benefactors of the human race who lived during the past one hundred years.
Henry Ford was another youth who haunted the public library searching for the solution to his “queer idea of a self-motive power for buggies.” Orville Wright and his brother Wilbur did not care much for school books but they had a consuming ambition to know all that the library could supply them on the subject of gliders and flying problems. It was a magazine story about boring a tunnel with a pneumatic drill that germinated in the mind of George Westinghouse the idea which later resulted in the Westinghouse air brakes.
Ipswich as well as any other town has geniuses which will appear if they are given the right start. The habit of reading books on subjects in which children are interested will start them in the same paths that have been followed by these great men.
There are over 4000 books on all subjects available now in the public library and if any person in Ipswich is interested in any particular subject, they should present a list of their wants in the way of books for action at the monthly trustees’ meeting.
There should be someone in Ipswich or the vicinity now who is ready to step into the shoes of Edison or of Wright or of Ford, or probably succeed in some other line. Young people of Ipswich have an opportunity that no other town between Ipswich and Mobridge has - a large well-equipped city library. Use it and succeed.
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